[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
Sit,—The smug complacency of your fatherly " Word tc Under Thirty " provokes me not a little.
Basing your criticism on the views of half a dozen individuals, you proceed to suggest that the youth of today lacks the spirit of adventure. And yet, to take but a single example; the sky over your very head swarms with young men whose exploits in the realm of civil and military aviation resound through the Press week in week out, and who daily risk life and limb in the act of duty and in their zest for adventure. Do you expect them all to write and tell you about the impulses that stir them ?
Every day young men leave home and family to go off and
build new lives abroad, in every corner of the world. But they are not the men to write and tell you about the spirit that moves them. You, surely, don't need to be told. It is the same spirit of inquisitiveness, the same zest far a full life, that moved. their fathers and forefathers back to the year dot.
An entire generation, incredible though it seems today,. Was removed during the War. That was a mere 20 years ago, when people of my generation were in their prams or at their preparatory schools. Now, before your very eyes, those children of 20 years ago are stepping into that gap and filling posts of responsibility in industry, in the professions, in every walk of life, far in advance of their years. And you suggest that we are all sitting back like your friends, moaning at the spectacle of the world we live in, but incapable of any effort to change it. But it is changing all round you, not suddenly in jerks but probably more rapidly than in any previous century. (Whether human nature can be changed is another matter, but you can hardly expect Under Thirty to do that in five minutes or five years.)
But you won't get young Englishmen to write and tell you these things. By nature they're too reticent, too lazy, too inarticulate, too modest, to write of themselves. Besides, these things are happening all round you, under your very nose ; there's no need for us to point them out to you. No, Sir, if the views of your tame scribes fall far short of your expectations that is their funeral ; but it hirrdly provides a reason for you to point the finger of reproval at the world of Under Thirty, which is doing its best in circumstances of unusual discomfort, the legacy of its predecessors.—Yours faithfully, St. Louis, Mo.
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